Chapter m21 The Apostolic Period [0-399 CE]

It should just be added briefly that the veneration of Mary, the mother of Jesus, which first developed in the Hellenistic Byzantine sphere (Council of Ephesus, 431: "mother of God" instead of simply "mother of Christ"), took hold in the West in the second half of the first millennium. It reached a climax in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, above all under the influence of the Cistercian monk Bernard of Clairvaux. Now above all the emphasis was on the cosmic role of Mary as virgin mother and queen of heaven. This was and idealization, just as papalism, Marianism, and the clerical monastic ideology of celibacy reinforced on e another. on the the other hand it is easy to understand why, given the abstract realms into which Christology had now been developed, the lovable human figure of Mary the woman, as in the form of then Madonna with the cloak, was extremely popular, in particular as the helper of the little people -- the oppressed and the marginalized. The New Testament Ave Maria was now, along with the Our Father, the most widespread form of prayer in the Middle Ages, soon supplemented with "In the our of our death. (Hans Hung - The Catholic Church: A Short History pg. 108)

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